Hipster Science: Women Prefer Men With Facial Hair

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The popularity of weird beards and mustaches among young men
living in Brooklyn, N.Y., may be more than just a hipster fad.
According to a new study, women and men find facial hair most
attractive when it is rare.

When shown men's faces, men and women study participants
consistently rated the faces with beards or stubble as more
attractive than clean-shaven faces. But beards were most alluring
when
facial hair was rare, whereas clean-shaven faces gained in
popularity when hairy faces were the norm.

"The mean attractiveness of a suite of faces is altered by the
frequency of beards," the researchers wrote in the study,
detailed today (April 15) in the journal Biology Letters. The
link between beard prevalence and preference "could alter the
cultural dynamics by which facial-hair fashions vary," they
added.

To beard or not to beard

From muttonchops to soul patches, beards take many forms. People
associate beards with age, masculinity and dominance, studies
show. But the popularity of facial fuzz has waxed and waned over
time. Sideburns peaked in popularity in 1853, sideburns with
moustaches peaked in 1877, beards alone peaked in 1892 and
moustaches alone peaked from 1917 to 1919, studies have found.

Rather than agreeing on an optimal amount of
hairiness, with less-attractive looks being weeded out,
humans tend to view an individual's attractiveness based not only
on his or her appearance, but also on the appearance of others,
the researchers said.

In the study, which was conducted online, straight or
bisexual women and straight men volunteers looked at
photographs of men when they were clean-shaven, after five days
of beard growth ("light stubble"), after 10 days of growth
("heavy stubble") and after at least four weeks of growth ("full
beard").

Volunteers were assigned to one of three groups. The first group
saw only clean-shaven faces, the second group saw only
fully bearded faces and the third group saw faces with all
four degrees of beard growth. The volunteers rated the
attractiveness of the faces they saw on a scale from very
unattractive to very attractive.

Afterward, the volunteers looked at a standard set of faces with
or without facial hair, and rated each face's attractiveness.

Across all groups, the volunteers rated beards and light or heavy
stubble as more attractive than clean-shaven faces, and heavy
stubble was rated more attractive than full beards.

But the preference for facial hair was greatest in the group who
saw only clean-shaven men, and least pronounced in the group who
saw only bearded men. Beards were rated as having intermediate
attractiveness by the group who saw both bearded and nonbearded
faces.

The findings suggest that facial hair is most desirable when it's
the exception, not the rule, the researchers said.

Fuzzy fashions

Preferences for rare traits, such as facial hair, could preserve
those traits in a population, and variation among individuals can
be key to a species' survival, the researchers said.

The researchers also considered other factors that could have
influenced the female volunteers' facial-hair preferences. For
example, they found that female volunteers' preferences were
related to the beardedness of their partners, but not to that of
their fathers. However, these factors didn't change the overall
finding that beards were more preferable when rare.

The study didn't look specifically at the
hairy hipster look. But if the majority of men adopt the
look, it just might go out of style.